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Campus Protests
Demonstrators protest on the "Day of Action for Higher Education" on April 17, 2025, in New York.
Universities across the country have been reeling from the Trump administration’s cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In less than 40 days, the administration canceled over $1.8 billion in grants, severing projects ranging from cancer research to diabetes treatments. Labor unions at the major public and private institutions across the country have been on the frontlines protesting the cutbacks.
Last week, a federal judge ruled some of the NIH cuts to be illegal, arguing the administration’s abrupt cancelation of grants to be “arbitrary and capricious.” Though the ruling covers only a small fraction of the total grants that the Trump administration has eliminated, it demonstrates the mounting legal pressure the administration faces.
The NIH has long been a crucial funder of biomedical and behavioral research for American universities, generating around $2.50 in economic activity for every dollar invested. Under normal circumstances, two separate review boards evaluate prospective grantees’ applications based on their scientific and technical merits. In February, however, the Trump administration took a cudgel to this process and announced that it would cap indirect costs (the cost of maintaining and operating facilities, which have typically fallen between 25 and 35 percent of total costs) at 15 percent and pause the panel review process.
This spring, student and university workers came together to protest the ongoing budget rollbacks at “Kill the Cuts” rallies across the country. “By cutting funds to lifesaving research and medical care, the Trump administration is abandoning families who are suffering and costing taxpayers billions of dollars,” said Rafael Jaime, president of UAW 4811, which represents 48,000 academic employees at the University of California. “These cuts are dangerous to our health, and dangerous to our economy.”
At Harvard, the first action against the Trump administration came from the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the union representing faculty and academic professionals. The AAUP sued the Trump administration to end its review of more than $8 billion in federal grants; the university itself filed suit shortly thereafter.
Harvard AAUP President Kirsten Weld told the Prospect that the Supreme Court’s early April ruling in Department of Education v. California, which ruled against requiring the Department of Education to reinstate more than $65 million in grants that it terminated in February, influenced the chapter’s sense of urgency. The justices’ decision to allow the cuts, she said, means that the institutions that have had rollbacks are now likely to be routed to the Court of Federal Claims. This body does not have the power to issue injunctions, so institutions seeking to have their funding reinstated will have fewer options for redress.
The administration’s actions have also sparked litigation at Columbia University. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the AAUP filed suit in late March in response to the $400 million cuts. Postdoctoral researchers and graduate students bore the brunt of NIH training grant rollbacks, and Columbia was forced to lay off 180 researchers—approximately 20 percent of researchers funded by federal grants.
“I've now filed more lawsuits since the [second] Trump administration started than probably in any other period of time in my legal career,” AFT President Randi Weingarten, who is also an attorney, told the Prospect. She also cited inaction by Republican leaders in Congress as playing a major role in the AFT’s response to the unprecedented moves taken by the White House.
Marcel Agüeros, a member of Columbia’s AAUP chapter, told the Prospect that the organization was compelled to act after university administrators failed to step up. “The decision was that even if the institution doesn't feel like it can fight back, we, as faculty, speaking on behalf of other people who've been impacted, could and should fight back.”
In California, where the state’s major public university systems (the University of California and California State University), have been grappling with an ongoing budget crisis, Trump's sudden war on higher education has underscored the leading role that unions have played in devising solutions to the crisis. Unions like the UAW 4811 have collaborated with lawmakers to promote legislation that could help develop alternative sources of revenue.
One such effort is SB-829, which seeks to establish a California Institute for Scientific Research—“basically a California NIH”—said Jaime, the UAW 4811 president, as well as a California Institute for Scientific Research Fund that would award grants and loans to finance various state research projects. The bill, which is pending, would establish the center within the state’s Government Operations Agency, which would be in charge of awarding grants and giving out loans. It also includes the creation of a separate fund to draw money from but doesn’t yet specify a specific funding source.
Meanwhile, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) proposed a nearly 8 percent reduction in the funding for the two statewide university systems, cutting the University of California system’s $4.6 billion in state funding by $396.6 million and California State University’s $5.4 billion by $375.2 million. However, the California State Assembly’s most recent budget proposal called for Newsom to reduce the cuts to 3 percent. Newsom eventually agreed to the reductions, bringing the cuts down to $129.7 million for the University of California and $143.8 million for California State University. “The actions we’ve been taking are definitely making an impact,” said the UAW’s Jaime. “It was only shortly after [Kill the Cuts] that the assembly countered with a five percent increase”
Labor researchers say many people took note of the quick response. “Workers, especially younger workers or people who weren’t knowledgeable about unions, are seeing the unions being the first ones to fight against the administration,” said Brenda Muñoz, executive director of the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
In North Carolina, reverberations from the NIH cuts are already being felt throughout the Research Triangle home to North Carolina State University (NCSU), Duke University, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-Chapel Hill), institutions that helped the Tar Heel State emerge as one of the top states for business in 2024, according to a CNBC report.
In addition to losing local research, NCSU’s AAUP chapter president Walt Robinson said the country will lose qualified researchers. In one case, one of Robinson’s colleagues, a National Climate Assessment researcher, had her funding cut in the middle of a project mandated by Congress.
Defunding research has ripples across academia and local municipalities, and diminishes America’s role as a “beacon to the smartest and most talented people all over the world,” said Robinson.
“If you look at the technological developments, the innovation that’s been created [is] by people who were either children of immigrants or immigrants themselves,” said Robinson. “We’re less attractive because the funding isn’t there or people are going to lose their visas, then we lose that access to that talent and brain power.”
Universities, especially well-funded ones like Harvard, can respond to the loss of federal funds by transferring money from their central budgets to the affected projects. But it’s difficult to deal with the cancellation of monies for in-progress experiments and research, which often rely on time-sensitive factors.
Many public institutions, like UNC-Chapel Hill, get a much larger percentage of their funding from federal sources. Eighty percent of UNC-Chapel Hill’s federal grants come from NIH alone, which helps support non-research staff, stipends, fellowships, and lab maintenance. Nyssa Tucker, a PhD student in computational toxicology, said that without NIH and other federal grants, fundamental pre-clinical research using computational models wouldn’t exist.
The cuts will also exacerbate the state’s growing labor shortages, which could cause a mass exodus out of the health care industry—or even the state. According to Tucker, graduate students were feeling squeezed by the cost of living even before the cuts. To live comfortably in the Research Triangle costs approximately $50,000 a year, which is twice the amount of the annual stipend given to graduate students.
Aside from national protests, lobbying state legislators, and taking the Trump administration to court, unions are also utilizing collective bargaining strategies to safeguard members. At the University of Florida, where 26 grants have been affected so far, the United Faculty of Florida at the University of Florida (UFF-UF) is doing just that.
“I’m in the process of trying to get impact bargaining for those people setting back the progression of their careers.” UFF-UF President Meera Sitharam told the Prospect. “In the case of research faculty who were purely paid on soft money grants, this is sort of unprecedented or an unexpected disruption of their careers.”
Impact bargaining allows labor unions to address terms and conditions outside the scope of their collective bargaining agreement. Regardless of whether or not a union currently has a contract or is in the midst of bargaining for a new one, whenever there is an impact on the terms and conditions of employment, a union can obligate an employer to bargain. “The union can say, look, this is a major effect on the terms and conditions of employment—we want to bargain certain protections and provisions that would mitigate the effects of this unprecedented assault,” said Sitharam.
For their part, labor leaders have called on university administrations to continue to resist the Trump administration’s demands, and have advocated for the creation of a Mutual Academic Defense Compact whereby participating institutions would provide support to any member institution under attack. They’ve also given praise to the university presidents who signed the letter rejecting the Trump administration’s “unprecedented government overreach” and “coercive use of public research funding.”
“I'm very proud of the university presidents that all signed the letter saying to Trump, saying stop trying to undermine academic freedom and the First Amendment and innovation and enterprise in this country,” says Weingarten. “And I hope that more and more people do this because that is how we will win freedom back.”
